We lost our TCD652160 the other night and I tracked it down to the hard drive no longer spinning. The power supply is fine though (I hooked up another SATA drive from some spare parts and it spun right up). Upon further investigation of the WD1600AVBS drive I found that the printed circuit board appears to have slightly melted the foam backing right at the "D1" chip on the board. My hunch therefore is that the issue is not the spindle, but the PCB.

Here's my question. Does anyone know whether the PCB on one of these drives can be swapped? If, say, I purchase a used TCD652160 with the exact same stock drive, can use that PCB to help bring my existing drive back to life?

Update: I purchased "same unit, same model", but newer date of manufacture, and therefore newer "rev" on the printed circuit board attached to the hard drive. For grins, I swapped the PCBs. The good news, the old drive still spins. The bad news, I could hear it cycling down and back up. I think that the answer is that "maybe" you can swap PCBs if the numbers on those boards are an exact match. In my case they were not and the swap failed without harm.

I have now mounted the new drive in the older box and am back in business. My old data is still intact and awaiting a solution. What makes the data loss more painful is the terabyte of external storage that I had attached. My understanding is that if I can't revive the old drive I'll also lose the data on the external drive. Is that correct?

Why didn't you just swap out the hard drives, then run Clear & delete everything (since its the drive is off a different serial tivo.) You will lose recordings when the drive goes bad, same when removing an external. The recordings are stored across BOTH drives.

Update: I purchased "same unit, same model", but newer date of manufacture, and therefore newer "rev" on the printed circuit board attached to the hard drive. For grins, I swapped the PCBs. The good news, the old drive still spins. The bad news, I could hear it cycling down and back up. I think that the answer is that "maybe" you can swap PCBs if the numbers on those boards are an exact match. In my case they were not and the swap failed without harm.

I have now mounted the new drive in the older box and am back in business. My old data is still intact and awaiting a solution. What makes the data loss more painful is the terabyte of external storage that I had attached. My understanding is that if I can't revive the old drive I'll also lose the data on the external drive. Is that correct?

Thanks,
Tim

Yes most of the recordings are stored across both drives you need both drives to recover the recordings.

The problems with swapping the hard drive's PC board is the servo and sector mapping data is stored on a chip during manufacturing even if you get 2 cards with the same revision recovery will still be hit or miss.

Yes most of the recordings are stored across both drives you need both drives to recover the recordings.

The problems with swapping the hard drive's PC board is the servo and sector mapping data is stored on a chip during manufacturing even if you get 2 cards with the same revision recovery will still be hit or miss.

Probably should have cannibalized the new drive's paddle board for individual parts like that diode.

Of course that involves knowing how to solder surface mount devices. Small surface mount devices.